This invention relates to a system for automatically filling and launching balloons in the atmosphere.
The subject of weather modification and control has been a source of interest and study for many years. However, attempts at actual weather control have generally been limited to processes for so-called cloud modification to cause precipitation. To induce precipitation, it is common practice now to "seed" the cloud with artificial ice nuclei, such as silver iodide crystals, which provide sites on which supercooled liquid water (water whose temperature is below 0 degrees C. but which still exists in the liquid phase) can freeze to form ice crystals. When the ice crystals are large enough, they fall as precipitation, either rain, snow, sleet or hail, depending upon other factors such as air currents, temperature and humidity.
Conventional methods of seeding clouds include the use of ground generators to release artificial ice nuclei into the air. However, with this method, artificial ice nuclei are often confined to narrow plumes which may take many hours to reach appropriate cloud altitudes, or may not reach targeted clouds at all because of temperature inversions or an unexpected change in wind direction. Airborne cloud seeding has also been used but it is difficult to realize significant dispersion of the seeding material in the cloud and as a result much of the cloud does not get seeded. There are ways to overcome this problem with airborne seeding, but the solutions can be costly and hazardous (use of more aircraft), time consuming (release the material far upwind and allow it to be carried by air currents to mix with the cloud). Exemplary prior art references dealing with cloud seeding include U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,357,926, 3,545,677, and 3,441,214.
The present invention contemplates the use of balloon launched seeding materials to induce precipitation. Although balloons have long been used to carry instruments into the atmosphere for making various tests, there appears to have been no systems designed for either automatically or remotely filling and launching balloons either for cloud seeding or atmospheric measurements or tests. G. C. Malloney et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,452,949, discloses a so-called "balloon launching system and method" by which large balloons, of the type used for carrying aloft heavy scientific equipment, are restrained while being inflated. J. W. Sparkman et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,524,609, discloses a system for launching payload-carrying balloons. The apparatus described in Sparkman et al is primarily designed to keep the strain off payload lines until just prior to the launch of the balloon, and to accommodate changes in wind direction. Neither of the referenced patents suggests that balloons could be utilized to seed clouds and neither discloses an arrangement whereby a series of balloons may be automatically filled and launched.